Marie Antoinette: the queen, her watch and the master burglar

An audacious museum heist, in which a timepiece made for Marie Antoinette was
among a haul worth hundreds of millions of pounds, left police clutching at
thin air. It was only when the watch turned up 25 years later that the
pieces of the jigsaw began to fall into place.

Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette

By Alix Kirsta

10:57AM BST 24 Apr 2009

In the early afternoon of Friday, April 15 1983, Jerusalem's LA Mayer Museum for Islamic Art as usual closed early for the Sabbath. The fortress-like pink stone building, 100 metres from Israel's presidential residence, would re-open the next day. Guards on night duty extinguished the lights in the galleries before settling down to chat, read and sleep. After an undisturbed night, they made their rounds before ending their shift by opening the large gallery at the rear of the museum, displaying Sir David Salomons's collection of antique watches. Inside there was chaos. Twenty-five years later, Rachel Hasson, the museum's director and curator, still gets emotional recalling the scene. 'I came as soon as they phoned me. It was shocking. On the floor were the glass panels and the locks of the showcases. Everywhere lay remnants of packing materials, tape and cardboard; there were empty Coca-Cola bottles, cables and wires.'

To her horror, Hasson saw that more than half the collection of 192 rare timepieces had vanished. Among these was a pocket-watch considered by experts to be the most important ever made. 'I saw at once they had taken the jewel of the collection, the Breguet No 160. The "Queen" was gone.'

The theft sent shockwaves through the international watch market. Made by Abraham-Louis Breguet for Marie Antoinette, the 160 is known as the 'Mona Lisa of watches' and worth more than $30 million. The burglary, unsolved for a quarter of a century, ranks as one of the great mysteries of the art world. Estimated at several hundred million dollars, the value of the entire haul makes this the biggest crime in the history of horology.

The failure of Israeli police to find the treasures despite help from foreign police, Interpol and Israel's intelligence service, Mossad, has always puzzled art crime experts. Even today, in the light of recent spectacular discoveries arising from a new investigation that extends to Europe and the USA, some aspects of the case remain baffling. Although most of the stolen pieces have been traced, and the identity of the criminal revealed, the case continues to raise disturbing questions. Why did the crime remain unsolved for 25 years? What happened to the watches over the years, and why did the museum fail to inform police when they recovered some of the stolen pieces?

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For decades, speculation persisted that the break-in must have been an inside job involving a museum functionary, or was commissioned by a collector. Both theories are plausible considering the rarity of the collection, and the history behind the Marie Antoinette watch, and the fact that thieves picked only the finest pieces. Dr George Daniels, today's foremost maker of watches and the author of the museum's original watch catalogue, points out that only an expert would recognise the Queen's uniqueness. 'Anyone interested in horology would know at once what it was: Breguet's most complicated and lavishly constructed watch. Breguet called it "a monument to 18th-century horological skills". The average person would not put so much value on it.'

The Queen is 60mm in diameter, encased in 18-carat gold, its back and front covers of rock crystal, revealing the intricate mechanism. It comprises 823 parts; every working surface is jewelled with sapphire; many inner parts, normally made of brass, are gold. It was commissioned in 1783 as a gift for Marie Antoinette from an unidentified admirer, thought to be her friend and reputed lover Count Axel von Fersen. The order specified that it should be the 'most spectacular watch possible' and contain every function, irrespective of cost. No completion date was set. The French queen was by then already an enthusiastic customer of Breguet's. With her passion for fine jewellery and fashion, she was the first person, in 1782, to order his newest invention, a self-winding watch known as a perpétuelle. Soon her husband, Louis XVI, his relatives and members at the court of Versailles acquired Breguet's elegant multi-function timepieces, launching his reputation as Europe's finest and most innovative watchmaker.

Not surprisingly, given the scale of the commission and the intervening bloodbath of the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette did not live to see her admirer's gift. She received her last Breguet watch, a simple model, in September 1792, delivered to her in prison (rumour has it she climbed the scaffold to the guillotine holding the watch). No 160 was not completed until 1827, four years after Breguet's death.

The masterpiece contains every known complication, a total of 23. These include a self-winding mechanism; a perpetual calendar; the display of solar time versus mean time; the phases of the moon; a repeater that chimes the hour, quarter-hour and minutes; centre seconds that can be stopped and started; a shock-absorbing device; a power reserve indicator – even a thermometer.

No 160 was eventually sold to the Marquis de la Groye, who took it back for repairs in 1838 but inexplicably failed to collect it. In 1887 it was bought for £600 by an English collector, Sir Spencer Brunton, and changed owners several times before being bought by Sir David Lionel Salomons to add to his extensive watch and clock collection, which already included 124 Breguets. Salomons, a mechanical engineer and inventor, was an authority on Breguet who claimed that 'to carry a fine Breguet watch is to feel that you have the brains of a genius in your pocket'. Salomons's daughter Vera, who inherited his estate in 1925, was a frequent visitor to Palestine; there she founded charitable institutions, hoping to promote Arab-Jewish understanding. Her mentor and alleged lover, Leo Aryeh Mayer, was the rector of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a noted professor of Islamic art and architecture. After Mayer's death in 1959, she founded a museum in his memory. The LA Mayer Museum for Islamic Art opened in 1974. Among rare Islamic artefacts, many purchased by Vera Salomons, her father's timepieces (including the last delivered to Marie Antoinette in prison) were bequeathed to the museum before her death in 1969 and became prominent exhibits. Until 1983.

Early attempts by police to solve the 'great clock heist' were to prove frustrating and fruitless. Only one thing seemed clear: given the extent of the haul and the many obstacles confronting an intruder, it would have taken a gang of at least three men to pull off the crime. The thieves, carrying tools, cables and packing materials, had somehow squeezed through a small window barely 50cm high, two and a half metres above the ground at the rear of the museum. The window had been opened from inside by someone breaking open several adjoining vents, putting their hand through and reaching for the catch. The vents were then sealed to prevent light inside alerting passers-by.

Later, the men wriggled out again carrying 102 ransacked pieces, including some large clocks and music boxes. A police video of a medium-built officer enacting a reconstruction shows him getting stuck halfway. This window, shielded by a protruding wall, opens on to an unlit blind alley, separated from the main road by a gated car-park. A truck had been parked by the wall, providing cover as thieves climbed a ladder to the window. The museum's burglar alarm was already broken – something the intruders possibly knew – so they remained inside undisturbed for many hours, knowing the guards were at the opposite end of the building.

What impressed detectives was the degree of sophistication with which the raid was planned and executed. It was a highly professional job. A cable ran along the corridor from the gallery to a door abutting the guards' quarters. A microphone at the far end of the cable allowed thieves to listen to what the guards were doing throughout the night. The glass panels of the display cases had been silently cut with a diamond-cutter, then lifted off using rubber suction cups.

The crime made headlines and created a furore in the antiques world. The museum came under fire for inadequate security and lax maintenance, and suspicion inevitably fell on museum staff; according to Rachel Hasson, all employees became potential suspects and many had to take polygraph tests. 'It was unavoidable. It became impossible not to suspect people close to you.'

Despite the amount of debris left behind, including tools, half-eaten snacks and a mattress, thrown in by thieves probably to cushion their fall, there were few clues and a puzzling lack of evidence. DNA technology was as yet unrefined and fingerprints on a cable and a cigarette packet did not match any on police files. Although Interpol, airport authorities, customs officers and border guards were on alert for anyone smuggling the watches, there were no arrests.

Investigators studied a list of known criminals skilled enough to carry out what appeared to be the perfect crime. The only name that stood out was Na'aman Diller, a prolific 'master-thief', who had become a celebrity in the 1960s and 1970s as the result of a series of daring, meticulously planned break-ins at banks and other premises. But records showed that Diller was out of the country in April 1983, so could not be a suspect. In any case, police doubted that even a master such as Diller could have carried off such a complex crime on his own.

As years passed, no more was heard or seen of the stolen watches. Since most were too well known to sell on the open market, it seemed likely that they had fallen into the hands of a lone collector, happy to admire them occasionally. According to Rami Mohr, a former police officer on the case, 'This was not the usual break-in. Usually people say things here and there so you build a picture. That never happened; no one talked. So there was an assumption they had been smuggled abroad.' With no leads to pursue, eventually Mohr and his colleagues closed the file.

It wasn't until 2007 that the Marie Antoinette again made headlines, for quite different reasons. News that it had, apparently, been secretly returned to the Jerusalem museum with 42 other stolen pieces, including 38 Breguets, emerged in late 2007. Rumours of a conspiracy or a cover-up began to circulate; the intrigue deepened. In August 2006 Rachel Hasson had a call from Zeon Jakubov, a Tel Aviv antiques dealer.

He had just been asked by a Tel Aviv lawyer to value some watches belonging to an unnamed foreign client. When he saw the watches, Jakubov was convinced that they were from the museum. 'I didn't take it seriously,' Hasson says, 'because for so many years people appeared and said similar things and it was always bullshit.' A day later, the lawyer, Hila Gabai, phoned Hasson and invited her to view the watches, asking her to bring George Daniels's catalogue of the collection.

Hasson and the museum's chairman, Eli Kahan, met Gabai several days later in Tel Aviv. 'Gabai had already prepared an agreement for us to sign,' Hasson says. 'She's a young lawyer with a lot of chutzpah. She wanted a lot of money for the watches. She said they were inherited by an anonymous client.' They asked to see the watches and were shown several battered cardboard boxes, labelled cabernet sauvignon. Inside were smaller boxes, containing, as Hasson saw instantly, some of the watches wrapped in newspaper. 'I opened them, and identified them from their numbers. Most were in good shape. Some were damaged. When I came to the Marie Antoinette, I couldn't help crying, it was so moving and exciting to see it after so many years.'

After tense negotiations with Gabai, they agreed to buy the watches for $30,000 – a negligible sum. She and Kahan took the watches back to Jerusalem, still in the wine boxes, and put them in the museum safe. Staff were kept in the dark about the episode. No one, not even the police, would know for another year. It seems strange that they didn't go to the police immediately, but Hasson insists the secrecy was crucial. 'There were complicated negotiations with the insurance company,' she says. 'It took a long time before we could repay the insurance money.' Only then, in November 2007, did Kahan inform the press.

The news was of special interest to Nicolas Hayek, the CEO and chairman of the Swatch Group, which had owned the Breguet brand since 1999. In 2004 Hayek had commissioned Breguet to make an identical model of the vanished Marie Antoinette to celebrate the €5 million refurbishment of the Petit Trianon, Marie Antoinette's private palace at Versailles, which was funded by Swatch. Hayek, who believes publicity over Breguet's new Queen helped the original to be recovered, was eager to see it for himself but the museum refused. 'It's a pity: we are the only ones who have the knowledge to renovate this masterpiece and we offered to help but they said the watch didn't need restoration,' Hayek says. The market was again abuzz with suspicion: why was no one allowed to see the recovered watches?

What Hayek did not know was that the museum was again sworn to secrecy for other reasons: Jerusalem's chief of police had ordered the case to be reopened. The immediate task was to identify the 'mystery woman' who had instructed the lawyer Hila Gabai to sell the stolen watches, on condition of her anonymity. Eventually police located the Tel Aviv warehouse where the loot had been stored. The rental company managing the property had a file containing the woman's ID and passport details: she was a US-based Israeli, Nili Shomrat, aged 59. A computer database identified her as the wife of Na'aman Lidor. Although that name meant nothing to police, a further trawl through their files revealed Lidor to be the master-thief Na'aman Diller, who had changed his surname. Twenty-five years after he was dismissed as a suspect, police realised a catastrophic error had been made by previous detectives in underestimating his astonishing range of skills, and by not checking thoroughly whether Diller was indeed, as records indicated, abroad at the time of the burglary.

Because of his many audacious crimes, some for which he was arrested and imprisoned, Diller was often pictured in the press and on television; by the 1970s his lean, pensive features were well-known. As he expanded his activities, committing similar crimes in Holland, Switzerland, Germany and France – where Paris became his operations centre – he often travelled in disguise, under a pseudonym, with false passports and other documents he had expertly forged. It would not have been difficult for him to re-enter Israel from Europe in April 1983 under another identity.

The second mistake was that investigators had always assumed the museum raid was the work of three or more criminals, not one. 'Once we knew it was Diller we had the big break we needed,' Sgt Major Oded Shama'a, who is leading the new investigation, says. 'Our next problem was to find the other watches.' But how could police be so sure that Diller was the thief? Because of his inimitable style and advanced methods, Shama'a says. 'Every crime of this type involves a gang or at least two people, not one,' he explains. 'This involved a lot of clocks, and took a very long time. Diller was a very interesting, unique guy: not a type we knew, nor our colleagues in Europe. He did everything alone, never with a partner. He was very smart and sophisticated.'

The admiration in Shama'a's voice is unmistakable, and it isn't hard to see why Diller captured the imagination of police and public alike. Because of Diller's notoriety, Chaim Livlin from Keshet-TV was permitted to film a documentary shadowing the police investigation and charting his criminal career. As Livlin discovered, Diller could have stepped out of a Hollywood thriller. He was the rejected child of unloving Polish parents, raised in a kibbutz, a sensitive, skinny boy, bullied for being a weakling. Highly intelligent, he joined the air force as a trainee fighter pilot; on his last flight before qualifying he decided, for a thrill, to swoop low – too low – over his kibbutz. The stunt cost him his career. Seeing himself as an outsider, rejected by society, he turned his skills to perfecting the art of crime. Psychiatric reports refer to him variously as 'a burglar with the sensitivities of an artist' and a criminal who 'wanted to be caught'. Known as Israel's first kibbutznik criminal, and the 'genius burglar', he is famed for spending months meticulously planning every detail of a crime, staking out premises in advance, familiarising himself with locations and obstacles.

One of Diller's most notorious break-ins was at a Tel Aviv bank in 1967. Over five months, he dug a tunnel from a nearby street into the bank. He told residents he was from the engineering department, carrying out checks on underlying cables, and installed a gas pipe directly from outside into the bank vaults containing its deposit boxes. Midway, when called up for military service during the Six-Day War, he hid the excavation under rubble.

Eventually he broke into the bank at night, disconnected the alarm and installed a home-made bomb with which he blew up the safes, escaping with I£97,000 and US$8,000 in cash, diamonds and jewellery. He took the spoils home, had a shower – then went back for more. This time he disturbed neighbours, who called the police. In an interview after his arrest, Diller claimed the craft of the raid gave him 'a strange thrill… like a man gets when he knows a beautiful woman next to him is willing to be his… like an animal in the forest, all your senses are alive… you just want the excitement.'

According to Shama'a, the museum break-in bore many of Diller's hallmarks. 'He was always prepared for problems. He spent many hours there; he brought food and drink; he knew all the museum's weak spots: the window, the broken alarm, the guards being at the front. He worked it all out on previous visits.' Shama'a and his team needed concrete information to find the other stolen clocks. It was then that they discovered that Diller had died four years earlier. There was only one person who could answer their questions now.

In May last year officers from the Los Angeles Police Department arrived at 6am at his widow Nili Shomrat's house in LA with a search warrant. Inside they found more watches, a music box, Islamic artefacts and rare oil paintings from the museum, including a Breughel and a Fantin-Latour. During three days' questioning, Shomrat, a teacher of Judaism, told Israeli investigators that when Diller, her boyfriend since the 1970s, was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2003, he confessed that he had carried out the museum raid. She was the only one who shared his secret. They married in Tel Aviv on April 15 2003 – the 20th anniversary of the raid. Afterwards she returned to LA; he stayed in Israel. They remained in daily contact by phone; he told her he had left her his entire fortune, including the watch collection, which he advised her eventually to try to sell. Diller died aged 65 in April 2004. After attending his funeral, Shomrat returned to California with no intention of leaving America again.

But the Israeli police have other plans: they want Shomrat extradited to Israel to stand trial for her alleged part in the conspiracy. Last October there was further proof of Diller's guilt, when relatives sent police his papers and documents. These provided a paper trail leading to his many bank accounts, safe deposit boxes and warehouses in Europe. Police found more watches in The Hague, Munich, Basle; 53 were in two banks in Paris, with documents about the watches stored at separate locations. Ten last missing pieces, which Diller sold at auction, are now being traced.

How much Diller knew about watches may never come to light. But a bizarre discovery reveals the extent of his obsessiveness, suggesting this was more of an intellectual exercise than a theft motivated by greed or profit. While examining the watches, Hasson found hidden inside each mechanism minuscule paper strips covered in diagrams and spidery handwriting, tightly rolled up in plastic. 'They were instructions: how to take them apart, put them together, how to reset, oil, wind them, how to look after them. He asked questions, gave answers. He was having a dialogue with himself. All the tiny watch parts he took out were in plastic bags. Maybe taking watches apart gave him pleasure: the crime can't have been for the money: hiring safes cost him money.'

The recovered watches are expected to be displayed later this year. But the investigation is far from over. Newspaper cuttings that Diller kept about other cases suggest he may have committed many unsolved crimes. The great watch crime may have been solved, and the 'Queen' safely retrieved, but how many more surprises will emerge from beyond the grave?